CAECILIUS ON THE SUBLIME
Favorable remarks on Hebrew literature are very rare in the Greek writers. One of the most significant is contained in the ninth section of Longinus’ famous treatise on the Sublime.
This Greek author—it will soon be seen why the name Caecilius and not Longinus appears in the title of this article—analyses sublimity of style into five sources: 1) grandeur of thought; 2) spirited treatment of the passions; 3) figures of thought and speech; 4) dignified expression; 5) majesty of structure. Longinus points out that the first two conditions of sublimity depend mainly on natural endowments, whereas the last three derive assistance from art.
It is when illustrating the first of the five elements that our author refers to the Bible. The most important of all conditions of the Sublime is “a certain lofty cast of mind.” Such sublimity is “the image of greatness of soul.” As he beautifully says: “It is only natural that their words should be full of sublimity, whose thoughts are full of majesty.” Longinus, accordingly, refuses to praise without reserve Homer’s picture of the “Battle of the Gods”:
A trumpet sound
Rang through the air, and shook the Olympian height,
Then terror seized the monarch of the dead,
And, springing from his throne, he cried aloud
With fearful voice, lest the earth, rent asunder
By Neptune’s mighty arm, forthwith reveal
To mortal and immortal eyes those halls
So drear and dank, which e’en the gods abhor.
An impious medley, Longinus terms this, a perfect hurly-burly, terrible in its forcefulness, but overstepping the bounds of decency. (I take these and other phrases from Mr. H. L. Havell’s fine translation). Far to be preferred are those Homeric passages which “exhibit the divine nature in its true light as something spotless, great, and pure.” He instances the lines in the Iliad on Poseidon, though there does not seem much to choose between them and the passage condemned above. But then follows the remarkable paragraph which is the reason why I have chosen Longinus for a place in this gallery: “And thus also the lawgiver of the Jews, no ordinary man, having formed an adequate conception of the Supreme Being, gave it adequate expression in the opening words of his Laws: God said: Let there be light, and there was light; let there be earth, and there was earth.”
Few will dispute that this passage in Genesis belongs to the sublimest order of literature. It is of the utmost interest that Longinus (whoever he was) should have recognized this fact. Whoever he was—whether the true Longinus, or an unknown rhetorician of the first century. Whether it belongs to the age of Augustus or Aurelian, it is equally noteworthy that the Greek writer should have admitted that the sublime might be exhibited by Moses as well as by Homer. It is quite clear, however, that Longinus did not take his quotation from the Hebrew Bible itself or from the Greek translation. Had he known the Bible, he must have made much fuller use of it. Read his analysis of the sublime quoted above. He could, and would, have illustrated every one of his five conditions from the Bible, had he been acquainted with it. Moreover, the quotation from Genesis is inexact. There is no text: God said: Let there be earth, and there was earth. Obviously, as Théodore Reinach points out, the reference is taken from the sense, not the words, of Genesis 1. 9 and 10. Longinus, therefore, either knew it from hearsay, or he had found the quotation in the course of his reading.
This latter suggestion was made as long ago as 1711 by Schurzfleisch—how Matthew Arnold would have jibed at a man with such a name commenting on the Sublime! Longinus quotes a previous treatise on the Sublime by a certain Caecilius. His predecessor, says Longinus, wasted his efforts “in a thousand illustrations of the nature of the Sublime,” while he failed to define the subject. Be that as it may, Longinus quotes Caecilius several times, especially for these very illustrations. It is by no means improbable, then, that Longinus’ reference to Genesis was derived from Caecilius, who may have paraphrased from memory rather than have quoted with the Bible before him. Now, Suidas informs us that Caecilius was reported to be a Jew. Reinach (Revue des Études Juives, vol. xxvi, pp. 36-46) has provided full ground for accepting the information of Suidas, which is now generally adopted as true.
Caecilius belonged to the first century of the current era, and, born in Sicily, the offspring of a slave, he betook himself as a freedman to Rome, where he won considerable note as a writer on rhetoric. The Characters of the Ten Orators was one of his most important books; several histories are ascribed to him; and, as we have seen, he wrote a formal treatise on the Sublime, which gave rise to the better-known work attributed to Longinus. It is not clear whether Caecilius was a born Jew or a proselyte. Probably the theory that best fits the facts is that of Schürer. We may suppose that the rhetorician’s father was brought to Rome as a Jewish slave by Pompey, and was then sold to a Sicilian. In Sicily, the son, who bore the name Archagathos, received a Greek education, and was freed by a Roman of the Caecilius clan. The freedman would drop his own name, and adopt the family name of his benefactor, according to common practice. Schürer offers a very acute, and I think conclusive, argument against the view that Caecilius was a convert to Judaism. A proselyte would have exhibited much more zeal for his new faith. In the works of Caecilius, I may add, his Judaism seems more a reminiscence than a vital factor. It is, on the whole, more likely that he came of Jewish ancestry than that he was himself a new-made Jew. Reinach contends that because he was a proselyte, Caecilius knew the Bible only superficially, and hence arose his misquotation of Genesis. Is that a probable view to take? If we conceive, with Schürer, that the father of Caecilius, a born Jew, had passed through such vicissitudes, being carried a slave from Syria to Rome, transferred into an alien environment in Sicily, we can well understand that the son would possess but a superficial memory of the Bible. On the other hand, a proselyte would have become a devotee to the Scriptures, the beauties of which had burst upon his mind for the first time. He would not misquote. The chief Jewish translators of the Bible into Greek (apart, of course, from the oldest Alexandrian version) were, curiously enough, proselytes to Judaism. Perhaps it would be too far-fetched to suggest that Caecilius had a particular reason to remember the first chapter of Genesis. His original name, Archagathos, is not a bad translation of the Hebrew “very good” (tob meod) which occurs prominently in the story of the Creation.
Unfortunately, none of the works of Caecilius is preserved. We know him only by a few fragments. Plutarch described him as “eminent in all things,” yet neither Schürer in his earlier editions, nor Graetz in any edition, placed him where he ought to be—to use Reinach’s phraseology—in the phalanx of the great Jewish Hellenists, with Aristobulus, Philo, and Josephus. Caecilius was the restorer of Atticism in literature, a piquant rôle for a Jew to play. Yet it is a part the Jew has often filled. An instructive essay could be written on the services rendered by Hebrews to the spread of Hellenism, not merely in the ancient world, but also in the medieval and modern civilizations.